The Enlightenment of Anna Labzina: Gender, Faith, and Public Life in Catherinian and Alexandrian Russia Author(S): Gary Marker Source: Slavic Review, Vol

The Enlightenment of Anna Labzina: Gender, Faith, and Public Life in Catherinian and Alexandrian Russia Author(s): Gary Marker Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 369-390 Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2697057 Accessed: 02-02-2016 17:42 UTC

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This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Enlightenmentof Anna Labzina: Gender, Faith, and Public Life in Catherinian and Alexandrian Russia

GaryMarker

In recent years the historiographyof Catherinian Russia has made small but perceptible strides toward engendering or at least toward discussing women as historical subjects outside the specific context of the household. Beginning withBrenda Meehan's 1976 article "Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule," most attention has focused, appropriately,on female rule and the question of how a patriarchal culture accommodated itself to the preponderance of female rulers in the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century.' In the interim,several scholars have had occasion to expand upon this theme, and yet most would agree that much remains to be explored on this topic.2 Meehan subsequently opened up a second front by examining con- vents and women's religious communities, arguing in essence that for many displaced nuns and lay women these communities constituted an alternative to domesticity,a way of achieving independence by serving God while in the exclusive company of other women.3 Adele Lindenmeyr's book on institutionsof charityin imperial Russia makes a similar point: in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the nexus of charityand religious self-sacrificeconstituted virtually the only extra-domestic outlet (ex-

1. Brenda Meehan-Waters,"Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule," RussianReview 34 (July1976): 293-307. 2. See, forexample, David Griffiths,"Catherine II and the Problemof Female Sover- eignty"(paper, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Honolulu, No- vember1993); BarbaraT. Norton,"Historical Assessments of Russia'sEighteenth-Century Female Monarchs"(paper presentedat the conference"New Understandings of the Expe- rience of Women,"Moscow, May 1994); Jehanne M. Gheith,"Introduction" to KyrilFitz- lyon,trans. and ed., TheMemoirs of Princess Dashkova (Durham, 1995), 8-13; A. I. Iukht, EkaterinaII i eeokruzhenie (Moscow, 1996), esp. 118-278; RichardWortman, "The Russian Empressas Mother,"in David Ransel,ed., TheFamily in ImperialRussia: New Lines of Histor- ical Research(Urbana, 1978), 61- 63; Karen Rasmussen,"Catherine II and the Image of PeterI," SlavicReview 37, no. 1 (March 1978): 51- 69; JamesCracraft, "Great Catherine," SlavicReview52, no. 1 (Spring1993): 115;JohnT. Alexander,Catherine the Great, Lifeand Leg- end (New York,1989), 62- 65 and elsewhere.See, also, LindseyHughes, "Peterthe Great's Two Weddings:Changing Images ofWomen in a TransitionalAge," in RosalindMarsh, ed., Womenin Russia and Ukraine(Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 31-41 and, fora somewhatmore popularnarrative, Evgenii Anisimov, Zhenshchiny na rossiiskomprestole(St. Petersburg, 1997), 277-398. 3. Brenda Meehan, HolyWomen of Russia (San Francisco,1993); Meehan, "To Save Oneself:Russian Peasant Women and the Developmentof ReligiousCommunities in Pre- revolutionaryRussia," in BeatriceFarnsworth and LynneViola, eds.,Russian Peasant Women (New York,1992), 121-33; Meehan, "Popular Piety,Local Initiativeand the Foundingof Women'sReligious Communities in Russia, 1764-1907," St. Vladimir'sTheological Quarterly 30, no. 2 (1986): 117- 42.

SlavicReview 59, no. 2 (Summer2000)

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 370 Slavic Review cept for singular figures such as Ekaterina Dashkova) to social or public service open to women.4 Michelle Marrese's recent dissertation has developed a third line of study, by examining women in the marketplace, specifically as buyers, sellers, and owners of property.5Much like Valerie Kivelson's and Robin Bisha's works on earlier periods, Marrese's dissertation concluded that noble women bought and sold propertywith increased frequency, often acting as the representative signatory for the household even when an adult male was available.6 This essay takes a highly microscopic approach to the question of women in public in Catherine's time. It offersa close reading of the memoir and diary ofjust one woman, Anna Evdokimovna Labzina, a provincial noblewoman who rose to considerable prominence in St. Petersburg's Ma- sonic milieu during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It explores how she depicted her life amid prominent men of letters and whether her renderings support or challenge the prevailing scholarly image of a largely unitaryRussian Enlightenment. More specifically,this paper inquires into how Labzina imagined a feminine presence, in general and for herself,within Enlightenment's realms of sociability,public activity,and civic virtue.

"The Enlightenment" survivesas one of the most enduring of historical categories, denoting, in Andrzej Walicki's phraseology, "an ideology that stood for a rationalist universalism,that was antifeudal and freethink- ing by definition,and that set out to liberate the individual ... by using ar- guments based on 'reason' and 'human nature,' which were thought to be common to all men and therefore superior to ... superstitions sanctified by custom."7 More recent scholars, however, deeply affected by Michel Foucault's antirationalism and skepticism, have challenged this comfort- able model, imagining instead a more pluralist, ambiguous Enlighten- ment, characterized as disciplinaryand repressive, the so-called dark side of formal egalitarianism and the rule of law.8 This general challenge to a unitary Enlightenment soon generated inquiry into the engendering of reason and law, specifically around the problem of "women and the public sphere," as Joan Landes termed it in her important monograph of the same name.9 Embedded in this discus-

4. Adele Lindenmeyr,Poverty Is Nota Vice:Charity, Society, and theState in ImperialRus- sia (Princeton,1996). 5. Michelle Lamarche Marrese,"A Woman'sKingdom: Women and the Control of Propertyin Russia,1700-1861" (Ph.D. diss.,Northwestern University, 1995). 6. Robin Bisha, "The Promiseof Patriarchy:Marriage in Eighteenth-CenturyRussia" (Ph.D. diss.,Indiana University,1993); ValerieA. Kivelson,"The Effectsof PartibleInheri- tance:Gentry Families and the Statein Muscovy,"Russian Review 53 (April1994): 197-212. 7. AndrzejWalicki, A Historyof Russian Thought from theEnlightenment toMarxism (Stan- ford,1979), 35. 8. JanGoldstein, "Framing Discipline with Law: Problemsand Promisesof theLiberal State,"American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April1993): 366- 67. 9. Joan B. Landes, Womenand thePublic Sphere in theAge of theFrench Revolution (Ithaca, 1988).

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Enlightenmentof Anna Labzina 371 sion has been a controversyover the verymeaning of "public sphere": is it a structure,as Jiirgen Habermas would have it, a "theater for debating," an "arena in which private persons deliberated about public matters"?10 Or, is "public" an intertextualcategory, less a concrete space than a claim made forprivileging certain discourses as being participatoryand freefrom the constraintsof the state and domesticity?By extension, does "feminine presence" mean the specific participation of women, as Landes or Mary Ryan maintain, or does it suggest something textual, that is, a category within "the public" that is deemed somehow "feminine"?" I To date there have been ratherfew attempts to transpose these debates to eighteenth-centuryRussia; most of the literatureholds firmin the belief that the Russian Enlightenment was simpler and more transparent,an un- complicated blend of officialutilitarianism and individualist sentimental- ity.In Nicholas Riasanovsky'swords, "Russian government and society fol- lowed the path of the Enlightenment in a remarkably united, conscious, and in many ways successful manner."'2 Even Marc Raeff,who in recent years has come to stressthe affectivequality of Russian thought, in the end sees these various strainsfitting into a coherent whole. "Russia's educated elite . . . found themselves closer to the German Aujkldrungthan to the French Lumieres,and we should speak of an 'enlightenment of the heart' as their most characteristic ingredient. This gave a more emotional tinge to the ethical goals they pursued in their effortsat a 'Transfiguration' of Russia and of its people." 13 Labzina's memoir and diary convey both "consciousness" and "heart," in abundance and with poignancy. In the process they offer a running commentary on the prevailing oppositions of male/female, public/ private,freedom/discipline, and-most critically-faith/reason that also form the verybasis of the contemporary debate over the Enlightenment. Distinctions between the private ("pertaining to intimate domestic or personal life,including sexual life"14) realm, to which she had access, and the public life of service, sociability,and print,from which she was largely ex- cluded, constituted veritable obsessions to Labzina, defining boundaries to which she unhappily submitted. By her example, however,she subverted the irreconcilabilityof these oppositions and ultimatelyreconfigured them as paradoxes, boundaries to be blurred, if not eliminated. In a recent es-

10. NancyFraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contributionto the Critiqueof ActuallyExisting Democracy," in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermasand thePublic Sphere (Cam- bridge,Mass., 1992), 113, 128. 11. Landes, Womenand thePublic Sphere, 7-13; MaryRyan, "Gender and PublicAccess: Women'sPolitics in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica," in Calhoun, ed., Habermasand thePub- licSphere, 261-86. 12. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky,A Partingof Ways:Government and theEducated Public in Russia,1801-1855 (Oxford,1976), 49. Perhapsthe mostthoroughgoing statement of Rus- sia's uncomplicatedEnlightenment is Hans Rogger's,National Consciousness in Eighteenth- CenturyRussia (Cambridge,Mass., 1960). 13. Marc Raeff,"At the Originsof a RussianNational Consciousness: Eighteenth Cen- turyRoots and Napoleonic Wars,"Political Ideas and Institutionsin ImperialRussia (Boulder, Colo., 1994), 67. 14. Fraser,"Rethinking the Public Sphere," 131.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 372 Slavic Review say,Andreas Sch6nle has astutelyremarked that patriarchy, which defined manyof the boundariesthat framed Labzina's world,is itself"predicated on blurringthe line betweenprivate life and public order.It appeals to the warmthand intimacyof familylife, in whichthe exerciseof poweris jus- tifiedas a disinterestedparental obligation."'5Thus, Labzina's memoir in particularcan be seen as part and parcel of the sentimentalismthat surroundedher. But, uniquelyamong her contemporaries,she simulta- neouslyobserved and subvertedthis relationship between privacy and au- thorityby making the personalpublic, the femininepowerful, and the sacred social.

An activeparticipant in salons and literarylife throughout her adult life,Labzina achieved littleposthumous notoriety, and fewdocumentary sources describe her earlyyears other than her own memoir,which nar- ratesher lifefrom early childhood throughmost of her firstmarriage to AleksandrMatveevich Karamyshev (the textbreaks off some time in the late 1780s,while the marriageitself continued until her husband's death in November1791).16 Born in November1758 into thefamily of Evdokim lakovovichIakovlev, a middlinghereditary nobleman witha small estate, Labzina lived the firstthirteen years of her life at home in the distant countrysidearound Ekaterinburg.'7Most of the experiencesthat she described-her parents'religiosity, her firstmarriage, her travels,her husband's servicein faraway locales, and so on-are substantiatedby service records and the accounts of contemporaries.Her chronologyof events in the 1770s and 1780s is accurate,as is the rosterof prominentacquain- tances thatshe introducesin the text. As best as one can determinefrom the spare documentation,Labzina did not omit the centraltransitions in her life,in contrastto other cele- bratedmemoirists, such as Nadezhda Durova,whose CavalryMaiden made no mentionof the child and husband she leftbehind when she ran offto the cavalry.Unlike Ekaterina Dashkova's memoirs, there are no questions of provenanceand authenticity.She published a fragmentof one of the chaptersin ajournal duringher lifetime(1817),18 and the originalmanu- scriptssurvive, bad spellingand all,in Labzina's distinctivelyuntutored and frequentlyungrammatical scrawl.'9 Thus, in comparisonto the veritable 15. AndreasSch6nle, "The Scare ofthe Self:Sentimentalism, Privacy, and PrivateLife in RussianCulture, 1780-1820," SlavicReview 57, no. 4 (Winter1998): 727. 16. MaryZirin's recent biographical entry, for example, is takenalmost entirely from the publishedversion of the memoir.See MaryZirin, "Labzina, Anna Evdokimovna,"in Marina Ledkovsky,Charlotte Rosenthal, and MaryZirin, eds., Dictionaryof Russian Women Writers(Westport, Conn., 1994), 355-56. 17. See her entriesin Grand Price Nikolai Mikhailovich,ed., Moskovskiinekropol' (St. Petersburg,1908), 2:135; and in Russkiibiograficheskii slovar' (St. Petersburg,1914), 10:1-2. 18. This fragmentis contained in an anonymousessay entitled "Vzgliad na Sibir"' thatappeared in an 1817 issue of Sionskiivestnik. 19. Questionsof authenticityhave surroundedDashkova's memoir ever since itsfirst appearance,primarily because thereare no survivingcopies in Dashkova'sown hand. Schol- ars have long been aware of Dashkova'sselective memory and her inaccuraterecounting of certainevents in her life.Most, though, have eitherpassed over thisissue or have concluded thatthe memoiris genuine.Recently, however, M. M. Safonovrevived the question

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheEnlightenment of Anna Labzina 373 handfulof otherwomen's autobiographical texts from the period, Labzi- na's writingsseem grounded in the eventsof her lifeas we knowthem. Labzina also wrotea diaryover severalmonths in 1818 and 1819, dis- cussingher lifewith her second husband,Aleksandr Fedorovich Labzin, to whomshe had been marriedsince 1794. As earlyas the 1770sLabzina was livingamid theelite of society-with her patron,Mikhail Matveevich Khe- raskov,her husband'spatron, G. I. Potemkin,and even withthe empress in Tsarskoeselo. But theassociation with Labzin gave hera muchfuller en- treeinto Russian intellectual circles,journals, and literarydiscussions, pri- marilyby way of Freemasonry and layspirituality. Equally important, Free- masonryprovided her withan eschatologicalvocabulary that framed her subsequent writingseven more than sentimentalism.Both the memoir (1810) and the diarywere penned duringthe manyyears with Labzin, and theirtone resonateswith the religiosityof Labzin's milieu,especially the DyingSphinx Lodge, of whichhe servedas Grand Masterfor many years untilMasonry was banned altogetherin 1822. Douglas Smith's work, Workingthe Rough Stone:Freemasonry and Society in EighteenthCentury Russia, emphasizes the remarkable uniformityof language and ritualthat seemingly spanned therange of Masonic lodges, both withinRussia and without.20Indeed, Masonic discoursewas so homoge- nized thatit is difficultto distinguishanything particularly Russian about theirceremonies, oaths, and spokencreeds. As Smithshows, however, Ma- sonrywas also intenselyhierarchical (the systemof degrees and orders), based upon presumablyshared values of virtueand, ultimately,spirituality.At the pinnacle of the Masonic pyramid,or the innercircle in which presidedthose who had proventheir greatest selflessness, charity, and de- votionto serviceto man and God, were the Rosicrucians,known in Russia as the Moscow "Martinists."Embedded in theircomplex mix of ideals for human improvementwas a deep, ifsomewhat eclectic, Christian religiosity,which, for a fewtook a decidedlyspiritualist and evenmystical direction. Since about 1780 the Martinistshad been linked above all withthe name of Nikolai Novikov,Moscow's most prominentintellectual, editor, and publisherand itsleading Freemasonuntil his arrestin 1792. This was the realmin whichAleksandr Labzin's outlook was forged.2'Dubbed Rus- sia's "premiermystic" in a recentstudy of conservatismduring the reign QfAlexander I, Labzin had been a disciple and then the personal confi- dant of Novikovfor many years, dating back to the late 1770s,and his par- of provenanceand concluded thatthe textwe recognize as the memoirwas not, strictly speaking,composed byDashkova. M. M. Safonov,"Ekaterina Malaia i ee 'Zapiski,"'in I. P. Palkina and D. M. Bulanin, eds., EkaterinaRomanovna Dashkova: Issledovaniia i materialy (St. Petersburg,1996), 13-22. Samples of the manuscript,showing Dashkova's lack of formal handwriting,were reproducedin the 1974 reprintedition. 20. Douglas Smith,WorkingtheRough Stone:Freemasonry and SocietyinEighteenth- Century Russia (DeKalb, 1999). 21. AleksandrLabzin had been a close associateof Novikovand a Martinistas earlyas 1780 when,as a studentat Moscow University,he became a memberof Novikov'sSociety of UniversityStudents and his FriendlyLearning Society. The twoof themmaintained an activecorrespondence for many years, right up to Novikov'sdeath in 1818. Duringhis lat- teryears, while confined to his estatein Avdotino,Novikov relied upon Labzin to act as his primaryconduit to both officialdomand Freemasonry.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 374 Slavic Review ticipationin the FriendlyLearning Societyand the Societyof University Studentsthat Novikovand his fraternalcomrade Johann Schwartzhad organizedin 1781. Even afterNovikov's banishment and disgrace,Labzin, much like Nikolai Karamzin,refused to abandon him,even actingas his primarycontact in the capital duringNovikov's long semi-exileon his estatein Tikhvinskoeafter his release fromprison. Their lengthycorrespon- dence, stretchingover three decades, touched on matterspersonal and mundane, but at their heart was a shared concern for the fate of the lodges and the spiritualsustenance of the membership.22 During much of Alexander I's reign,Labzin servedas the reputedly tyrannicalhead of DyingSphinx, the capital'smost prominent and most faith-centeredlodge duringthe Masonic revivalof the earlynineteenth century.23Within Dying Sphinx the enduringprinciple of servicewas con- structedso as to put serviceto God and the pursuitof grace at itscenter. The participantsin thismilieu intertwined the pursuitof good workswith fidelityto the Commandments,subordinating-but not dismissing-reason to the mysteriesof faith. For Labzin and his closestassociates, this outlook reached itsapotheosis with the establishment of the Russian Bible So- ciety(1814-1822), the vauntedeffort joined byAlexander I, the Russian OrthodoxChurch, and leading Masons to translatethe Bible intovernac- ular Russianand to disseminateit widely throughout the empire.24

This blending of religiosityand public service framed the mental worldwithin which Labzina flourishedin theyears of her writings. She was an instrumentaland acclaimed memberof the group thatoversaw the religious-if un-Orthodox-journal, Sionskiivestnik (The messenger of Zion) in 1806, a publicationwhose stresson innerfaith and spiritualre- birthangered the ecclesiastical authorities.25 We shallnever know whether she drew these values fromthe Alexandrianmilieu of her matureyears or whetherthey were instilledfrom childhood. Labzina, though,had no doubt thatthe source was parental.At the veryoutset of the memoir,she informsus thather fatherdied when she was fiveyears old, and in the yearsthereafter her upbringingfell to her passionatelyreligious and oc- casionallydelusional motherand to an equallypious and devoted nanny. In 1772, duringher mother'slast months,Labzina was marriedoff at the

22. Much of the correspondencebetween Labzin and Novikovhas been publishedin a varietyof venues. See, forexample, A. I. Serkov,et al., Pis'maNovikova (St. Petersburg, 1994), nos. 39-42, 49-58, and 61; B. L. Modzalevskii,"K biografiiN. I. Novikova:Pis'ma ego k Labzinu,Chebotarevu i dr.,1797-1815," Russkii bibliofil, 1913, no. 3:5-39 and no. 4: 14-52. 23. Alexander M. Martin,Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thoughtand Politicsin theReign ofAlexander I (DeKalb, 1997), 160. 24. On the Bible Society,seeJudith C. Zacek, "The RussianBible Societyand theRus- sian Orthodox Church,"Church History 35, no. 4 (December 1966): 411-37; I. A. Chisto- vich,"Ocherk iz istoriireligioznogo mistitsizma v tsarstvovanieAleksandra I," Russkaiasta- rina, 1894, no. 2:120-34; and Martin,Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 159-67. 25. For a briefdiscussion of thisencounter, see JudithC. Zacek, "Introduction,"to A. E. Labzina, VospominaniiaAnny Evdokimovny Labzinoi, 1758-1828 (St. Petersburg,1914; reprint,Newtonville, Mass., 1974), iii-iv.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheEnlightenment of Anna Labzina 375 age of 13 to Karamyshev,a promisingand outwardlyimpressive 28-year- old memberof the so-calledSiberian nobility; they remained married un- tilhis death in 1791. Educated at the EkaterinburgMining School and MoscowUniversity, Karamyshevwas in manyways an example of thebest thatthe RussianEn- lightenmenthad to offer.Successful in his studies,he wentoff to Uppsala Universityin Sweden to studynatural sciences and chemistryunder Lin- naeus, forwhom he wrotea learned dissertation(in Latin) explainingthe necessityof producinga naturalhistory of Russia.Upon returningto Rus- sia he pursueda distinguishedcareer, serving in the MiningCollege in Ir- kutsk,Nerchinsk, and St. Petersburg.He was a correspondingmember of both the Swedishand the RussianAcademy of Sciences and the author of several serious workson miningand economics, as well as a certain amount of ratherpoorly regarded poetry. At one point he was a member ofPotemkin's inner circle at Tsarskoeselo and in thatmilieu he came into contactwith the empress.26 As a professionaland public figure,therefore, Karamyshev embodied themost sublime qualities of Enlightened absolutism, proof positive of the virtueof teachingthe provincialnobility, for whom education offereda surepath to improvement.In MarcRaeff's words, "Schooling turned out to be an essentialelement in [the] projectof 'transfiguring'Russian man- members of the noble service class firstin line.... Internalization was rightlydeemed crucialfor the new normsof productivity,polite conduct, and civilizedinterpersonal relations to be operativeand the politicaland social ordermaintained."27 Labzina's account,however, replaces the posi- tiveand civilizedimage of thepublic man witha fardarker private one, in whichKaramyshev emerged as somethingelse: an inveteratecard player, carouser,philanderer, and drunkwho carriedon a long termand fairly open incestuousrelationship with his niece and who relishedmolesting youngservant girls.28 About thesematters, Labzina did not mincewords. On incest:"We ar- rivedin town... and,when everyone went away to sleep,his niece appeared and came to bed withus. Whetherhe seemed close to her,or whetherfor some otherreason thatI did not then understand,they sent me awayto sleep under the canopy."29On philandering:"At night . .. I lay theresi- lently,afraid to disturbmy husband, when I saw him get up veryquietly, come overto me, and askwhether I was sleeping.I did not answer,and, be- lievingthat I was asleep, he wentinto another room where a youngwoman lay in bed. And I saw all the abominationswhich he did withher!"30 On

26. In additionto the sourcescited elsewherein thispaper, Karamyshev's career can be followedin his entryin Russkiibiograficheskii slovar' (St. Petersburg,1897), 8:514-15. 27. Marc Raeff,"Transfiguration and Modernization:The Paradoxes of Social Disci- plining,Pedagogical Leadership,and the Enlightenmentin 18thCentury Russia," Political Ideas and Institutionsin ImperialRussia, 341. 28. The molestationof a 10-year-oldgirl is recountedon page 83 of the 1914 edition of Labzina, Vospominaniia. 29. Ibid., 36. 30. Ibid., 82.

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child molestation:"There was a 10-year-oldgirl livingwith us who was mama'sservant.... I was not home at the time.He lured her into the bed- room, locked the door, but he was afraida shout mightbring someone. The girlherself told her aunt everything." Page afterpage recountsscenes of abuse and humiliation-indeed these scenes constitutethe majorityof the memoir,all of which,Labzina assuresus, she bore as a this-worldlyChristian martyr, with prayer, loving patience,and dogged obedience, readyto expressjoyat the merestsign of affection.This typeof revelatoryprose underminescompletely the moral superiorityof the public and secular and exposes theirpainful interven- tionsinto her own privatelife as littlemore than depraved tyranny.But she never challenges patriarchy'smorality as such. The lengthydigres- sions about Kheraskov,for example, her longtimebenefactor who stood at theintellectual center of Moscow in the 1770s, convey the multipleways in whichhe carriedout his fatherlyoversight of her vospitanie(moral upbringing).Her narrativepaints Kheraskov as a nurturingbut complicated figure,consistent with Sch6nle's definition,whose overweeningpaternal- ism alternatelysupported and repressedLabzina as she struggledto de- finean identityfor herself in the highlysociable household of one of the mostprominent figures in Russianletters.

All of thisis veryinteresting, not to mentioneye-popping. As docu- ments,moreover, these constitute the onlyrecorded example of a Russian fromthis era, male or female,penning both a memoirand a diary,thus add- ing yetanother level of uniqueness. Nevertheless,Labzina rarelyfigures prominentlyin the pantheon of literarynotables of the Catherinianand Alexandrianage. Most ofwhat has been writtenties her almostentirely to Labzin, an understandablebut regrettableoversight, since most of what Labzina did writedeals withthe timebefore she metLabzin.31 Neither the memoir nor the diaryhad much of a publishinghistory until recently, and, in spite of theirhighly sentimental and stylizedprose, it is not at all clear thatshe intendedthem to be published.The narrativeends literally in midsentence ("I have often envied . . .") at a particularlycritical junc- turein the midstof whatappears to be a decisiveconfrontation with her husband, and, althoughshe lived anothereighteen years after first pen- ningit, she neverrevised or completedthe text.Unlike almost every other memoirwriter of the period,she profferedno introductorydedication of any kind (typicallythey are dedicated to one's childrenor to posterity), and the textgives few hints about the impliedreader.2 31. To give one example, when Modzalevskii's1914 edition of Labzina's memoirs were republishedin a reprintedition in 1974, the new introductiondevoted precisely one paragraphto Labzina herselfand accorded the remainingspace to Labzin and Russian mysticism,in spiteof thefact that the memoirends long beforeLabzina meetsher second husband! See Zacek, "Introduction,"to Labzina, Vosponzinaniia,i-v. 32. Mary Mason has suggested that women's autobiographicalwritings in general were less egocentricand less programmaticthan male autobiographies,and thatwomen typicallydefined themselvesby pairing their own identitieswith others. Both Barbara Heldt and Beth Holmgren have made similarobservations for Russian women writersof the nineteenthand twentiethcenturies. Labzina employsthis strategy of pairingherself

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Althoughmarried twice, Labzina had no childrenof her own.She and Labzin did raiseher sister'stwo children, one ofwhom wrote an apprecia- tivememoir of her upbringing.33Left in the care of her niece, and later her grand niece, Labzina's memoirwas not published until 1903, when B. L. Modzalevskiibrought out a definitiveedition, first in Russkaiastarina and laterthat same yearas a book. Republishedin 1914, the memoirre- mained infrequentlydiscussed until very recently. The fewworks to treat Labzina in her own right,most importantly Modzalevskii's introduction, have tended to reduce her to a variantof the female martyrfamiliar in both saints'lives and secularliterature, the patientsufferer and almsgiver, who in saintlyfashion foregroundsher own virtueby dramatizingthe abominationsshe endures at the hands of the impious people who sur- round her. A starkalternative to thisview, first proposed by P. Bicilli in 1934 and then elaborated in more detail by Iurii Lotman in his posthu- mouslypublished essay "Dve zhenshchiny,"focuses on the memoiras a lit- erarytext and deems it a dramaticand nonnaturalisttragedy, a zhitiealong the model of Awakum and Ol'ga Morozova.34Lotman insiststhat Labzi- na's memoir(he makesno mentionof the diary) must be seen as a "psycho- logical"text, one thatcould not possiblyconstitute an accurateaccount of lifewith Karamyshev. He complainsthat the absence of othereyewitness accounts permittedher an open field on which to conveywhatever she chose. Leftfree to imagine,Labzina wroteabout depravities,card playing, and carousingto fillthe void when, Lotman assuresus, Karamyshevwas probablyjust workinglate at the lab.

Karamyshevwas a chemistand teacher. During the time in question he had set up a laboratoryin whichhe conductedboth instructionaland scientificexperiments. Simultaneously, he had takenon a large admin- istrativeresponsibility. His time, so it would appear, was scarce. One mightsuppose thathe ran a seriesof experimentsat night,which at the veryleast would occupy him until late evening. His fatigueand dirty hands and clothes could just as easily have resultedfrom card games or fromscientific experiments. We have beforeus twoalternatives and we cannot trulyfathom how Karamyshevwas actuallyspending his time. We can only note thatfor his wifethere were no alternativescenarios: she was sure in advance thathe was engaged in depravities,and thatcer- withanother repeatedly in her memoirand diary,although the paired otherchanges con- tinuously.Thus, the absence of a dedicationor an obviousimplied reader may have less to do withthe decision to publish than withnarrative strategies of femalewriters. Mary G. Mason, "The OtherVoice: Autobiographiesof WomenWriters," in Bella Brodzkiand Ce- leste Schenck, eds., Life/Lines:Theorizing Women' Autobiographies (Ithaca, 1988), 21-23; BarbaraHeldt, TerriblePerfection: Women and RussianLiterature (Bloomington, 1992), 6-24, 77-79; Beth Holmgren,Women's Work in Stalin'sTime: On Lidiia Chukovskaiaand Nadezhda Mandelshtam(Bloomington, 1993), 2. 33. B. L. Modzalevskii,"Vospominaniia Sof'i AlekseevnyLaikevich," Russkaia starina, 1905, no. 4:168-201. 34. P. Bicilli, "Die 'Haus'-Literaturund der Ursprungder klassischenLiteratur in Russland,"JahrbiicherfiirKulturund Geschichte derSlaven 10 (1934): 398-99; Iu. M. Lotman, "Dve zhenshchiny,"Besedy o russkoikul'tury: Byt i traditsiirusskogo dvorianstva (XVIII-nachalo XIX veka)(St. Petersburg,1994), 301.

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taintypredetermined her observations,and inevitablydistorted what she actuallysaw.35 Far from being the monster that Labzina described, Karamyshevwas a true lumiere,nurturing and cultivating his young wife, so unschooled in Enlightenment that her fanciful mental world transformed his attentive- ness into its veryopposite, a diabolical lovelessness. If we recall thatKaramyshev was educated in a Europeanmanner, that he was a greatscholar, and thateven Labzina neverdenied the goodness of his character,then one can suggestthat in all probabilityhe was con- sciouslyeducating [vospytival] his own wife in thespirit of his own concep- tion of "philosophicalideas." Consistentwith the naturalismof the eighteenthcentury, Karamyshev made a distinctionbetween love as a moral feelingand the naturalsex drive.36 Thus, for Lotman, a Russian nobleman educated "in a European manner" simplycould not have behaved as Labzina described, as if Enlighten- ment and science were so ennobling as to preclude spousal abuse, an odd view coming from the hindsight of the twentieth century. Karamyshev offered the giftsof knowledge and philosophy, while Anna Evdokimovna wanted his affection. Denied the love she craved, she concocted this evil persona to explain that loss. We shall have occasion to revisitsome of these interpretiveissues a bit later, but Lotman's determination to debunk the memoir, to insist on seeing Karamyshevas a Chernyshevskian-typemix of Aleksandr Kirsanov and Rakhmetov, while consigning Labzina to the sta- tus of a hopelessly preconscious Vera Pavlovna, is, to put it mildly,curi- ous.37 Fanciful or not, Labzina's actual text belies much of Lotman's brief in that it recounts in lurid detail activitiesthat she witnessed with her own eyes-or so she says-and many that took place right in her own house. Moreover, Labzina wrote these memoirs not as an inexperienced and un- lettered adolescent but when she was in her early fifties,long aftershe had become a society woman and had participated for many years in cosmopolitan sociability and assimilated a great deal of Enlightenment reasoning. Using Lotman's logic, by then she surely would have known better. The past few years have witnessed a very differentsketch of Labzina, inspired almost entirelyby the attempt to recover Russian women's litera- ture. A new edition of her memoir, edited by V. M. Bokova, appeared in Moscow in 1996 and another one is currentlybeing prepared byIuliia Zhu- kova, also in Moscow.38The brief entryon Labzina writtenby Mary Zirin in the 1994 Dictionaryof Russian WomenWriters uses the memoir to focus on Labzina's own life.39Still, Labzina is farfrom canonized even withinRus- 35. Lotman, "Dve zhenshchiny,"310. Emphasisadded. 36. Ibid., 310. Emphasisadded. 37. The reference,of course, is to Nikolai Chernyshevskii'sWMat Is toBe Done? The mostrecent translation of thiswork is byMichael R. Katz (Ithaca, 1989). 38. V M. Bokova, ed., Rossiia v memuarakh:Istoriia zhizni blagorodnoizhenshchiny (Mos- cow,1996), 13-88. Bokova,while emphasizing Labzina's womanhood,accepts the affinity betweenher memoirand the genre of-men's-zhitiia and makes specificreference to Awakum (quite a stretchin myview) and the "ZhitieMoiseiia Ugrina." 39. Zirin,"Labzina, Anna Evdokimovna,"355-56.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Enlightenmentof Anna Labzina 379 sian women'sliterature. Neither Catriona Kelly'srecent A Historyof Rus- sian Women'sWriting nor M. Sh. Fainshtein's Pisatel'nitsypushkinskoi pory, forexample, mentionsher at all.40Recent studiesof eighteenth-century memoirwriting, by A. G. Tartakovskiiand M. A. Kriuchkova,also ignore Labzina, and the workson mothersand daughtersby Barbara Engel,Joe Andrew,andJessica Tovrov note her onlyin passing.4' As a consequence,Modzalevskii's 1903 introductionremains the single substantiveaccount of Labzina's life. Deeply sympatheticto his subject, Modzalevskiimaintained an admirable fidelityto Labzina's text-espe- ciallyin comparisonto Lotman'sdismissiveness. He too imposed his own moralitytale, however, in whichLabzina's unhappylife took a decisiveturn for the betterwhen she came under Kheraskov'sprotection. "[Khera- skov],who was distinguishedby his kindnessand hiswarm heart, accepted Anna Evdokimovnaas his natural daughterand soon came to love her dearlyfor her obedient manner.He took upon himselfresponsibility for her education and secularupbringing ... which,of course,she could not have receivedin childhoodwhile living in a backwoodsvillage of a distant borderland."42So even forher greatestadmirer, Labzina's lifewas essen- tiallya storyof twomen, the talentedbut fallenKaramyshev and the vir- tuous and ultimatelydecisive "RussianHomer," Kheraskov.Armed with the upliftingpower of Enlightenment,the city,and secularvirtue, Khera- skovvanquished the dark side of noble sociabilityand raised Labzina to consciousnessand a betterlife.

My own readingof the memoirand diaryis largelydevoid of angels, more complicated,and less amenable to a happy or teleologicalunder- standing.Labzina surelyrevered Kheraskov as a beneficentpatriarch, but her life as she depicted it remained quite miserablelong afterMikhail Matveevichbecame a partof it.In the end she (or at leastthe textualLab- zina) did indeed findher bearings,a wayof distinguishingbetween a de- meaningformal responsibility to marriagevows and patriarchyand her own personalwill. Although never afforded a formaleducation or private tutoring,she read voraciously,shared the companyof men and women alike,and embracedthe didacticism of moral improvement that motivated so manyof the public men of her age. Moreover,during the lastthree decades of her lifeshe definedan identityfor herself that was highlyvisible and extradomestic.

40. Catriona Kelly,A Historyof Russian WomensWriting, 1820-1992 (Oxford, 1994); M. Sh. Fainshtein,Pisatel'nitsy pushkinskoi I)ory: Istoriko-literaturnye ocherki (Leningrad, 1989). 41. M. A. Kriuchkova,"Russkaia memuaristika vtoroi poloviny XVIII v. kak sotsio- kul'turnoeiavlenie," Vestnik MVoskovskogogosudarstvennogo universiteta, series 8, Istoriia,1994, no. 1:17-28; A. G. Tartakovskii,Russkaia memuaristika XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Mos- cow,1991);Joe Andrew,"Mothers and Datughtersin RussianLiteratture of the FirstHalf of the NineteenthCentury," Slavonic and Fast EuropeanReview 73, no. 1 (January,1995): 37- 60; JessicaTovrov, "Mother-Child Relationships among the Russian Nobility,"in Ransel, ed., Familyin ImperialRussia, 31; BarbaraAlpern Engel, Motheis and Daughters:Women of the Intelligentsiain Nineteenth-CenturyRussia (Cambridge,Eng., 1983), 14-16. 42. Modzalevskii,"Predislovie," in Labzina, Vospominaniia,xiv.

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But within the memoir the path to life and contentment outside the household did not lie with prosveshchenie(Enlightenment), still less with the secular vospitanie that Modzalevskii and Lotman so valorized. Quite the contrary.For Labzina, countrylife was pure, open, free, and uplifting, a sentiment she shared with several eighteenth-centurywriters, male and female.43Hers was not the desperate nostalgia for the imagined paradise of a childhood on the country estate, both so typical of noble familyal- bums and memoirs from this period. Nor does her description of nature suggest the subtle dark undertones of,for example, Andrei Bolotov's coun- tryidyll, the "serpent in the garden," as Thomas Newlin has so aptly put it.44Rather, the rural outdoors was godly,bracing, and unbounded, much like it was for Durova, starklyjuxtaposed to the suffocationof being forced to remain hidden awayin a man's world, whether it be in Kheraskov's house in the cityor her husband's.45 Enlightenment, in turn,was signifiedby her husband, forwhom reason and the laws of nature were mere rationalizations for an intrepid pursuit of pleasure. As Labzina's aunt explained earlyon "thisis the firsttime thatyou shall not have the excellent life in our quiet littlerefuge. But you shall en- joy the city.... Your own husband loves society more, as a kind of amuse- ment, and you too must love it and live in a way that is useful for him."46 Karamyshevridiculed this idyllof pastoral innocence and freedom, and he is tied in the text to soliloquies that equate rationalism with the depraved pursuit of carnality. "Throw off your stupid prejudices, my dear friend, which are rooted in your stupid instructionsfrom childhood! There is no sin or shame in making your life merry.... How sweet you are when you begin to philosophize! I believe that what you call a sin is merely a natural pleasure, and in this I am not accountable to anyone."47 This line of natu- ralistreasoning, of course, lay at the heart of Lotman's defense of Karamy- shev's "healthy sex drive," but we must keep in mind that it was Labzina herselfwho composed these passages, proof positive that she was familiar with the Enlightenment's state of nature. In Labzina's world, though, ab- stractrationalism and natural law- secularism-denoted hedonism and the abuse ofvirtuous women byevil men-her husband-to whom women were constrained to submit by civil law and custom, but in whom she saw

43. The themeof noble pastoralismis beautifullypresented in PriscillaRoosevelt, Life on theRussian Country Estate: A Socialand CulturalHistory (New Haven, 1995), esp. chap. 6: "Nestsof Gentlefolk:Patriarchy in the Provinces,"and chap. 11: "Ideal Worlds:The Idyll of the RussianIntelligentsia." 44. Thomas Newlin,"Rural Ruses: Illusion and Anxietyon the RussianEstate, 1775- 1815,"Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 295-319. 45. Compare Durova'sdescription of a girlhoodfrolic in the fields:"This was theveiy firsttime in mylife that I had been takenout into the open whereI could see dense for- est and vast fieldsand the wide river!I could barelycatch my breath forjoy . . . I ran, frisked,picked flowers,and climbed to the tipsof tall treesto see farther.... Two hours flewlike two minutes!. . . how could I part withsuch captivatingfreedom?" Nadezhda Durova, The CavalryMaiden: Journals of a RussianOfficer in theNapoleonic Wars, trans. Mary FlemingZirin (Bloomington,1989), 6-7. 46. Labzina, Vospominaniia,34. 47. Ibid., 68, 78.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheEnlightenment of Anna Labzina 381 only wantonness. For her, the locus of this depravitywas unmistakably the civil, both spatially,as the city (civitas), and culturally,as civil society. As Labzina told her mother-in-law: "This love is difficultfor me! Does every- body love in this way at the place where he wants to bring me, and is this the kind of moral upbringing that is called the best and enlightened?"48 Formal or customary law, the vaunted building blocks of both liberal civil society and the Rechtsstaatof Enlightened absolutism, fared littlebet- ter. From her aunt: "It is apparent that [your husband] wants to take you away from everythingthat can remind you of your mother. I see that this makes you bitter,and I share in your grief,but, my friend,you should already be livingunder his laws.... You already know how great and sacred is your obligation to your husband, so when you carryit out you shall also be carryingout God's law."49Her response: "What kind of law deprives a person of everythingshe holds dear once she is married?"50 What about the well-ordered patriarchal family, embodied by her benefactor, Kheraskov? Labzina mostly showered him with praise, but rather than secularity,sociability, and individuality,Labzina described a tutelage constructed upon a rigidlycontrolled regimen that-much to her relief-brought her back to the scriptural and prayer-centered life that she had been forced to abandon aftermarriage. She was kept apart from polite society,even within the Kheraskov household. "When theywere en- tertaininga large number of guests I was to sit with my benefactor and father,even though this initiallysaddened me.... Finally I began to say that I would like to be out among the guests. He said to me gently,'Why do you want to do that,my friend? If it were useful foryou I would have suggested it myself.... Don't create impediments that would get in the way of my doing what I know to be best, and I shall see you progress further!"''5' She tells us that she did not know what a novel was and assumed initially that romanreferred to a specific person. ("I asked Elizaveta Vasil'evna who this 'Roman' was that they kept talking about and why had I never seen him."52) Somewhat later Kheraskov advised her, "Beware of reading novels. They will not do you any good and they can bring you harm."53Clois- tered, controlled, kept indoors and away from people, forbidden from speaking her mind, Labzina observed, "This sort of upbringing was altogether new to me."54 In fact, Kheraskov's ministrationswere directed not at all at bringing Labzina into the open air, but rather at advising her on how to deal pri- vatelyand inwardlywith her waywardspouse. Mydaughter ... Be calm and listento me. Only now are you beginning yourlife with your husband, and I see thathis habitsand inclinationsare unknownto you. But I shall tellyou. He likeslarge and boisterousgath-

48. Ibid., 37. 49. Ibid., 34. 50. Ibid., 35. Emphasisadded. 51. Ibid., 48, 50. 52. Ibid., 48. 53. Ibid., 58. 54. Ibid., 48.

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erings.Cards are his passion and he has anothervice [here referringto adultery],no betterthan cards, and withoutus theremay be no one to re- strainhim. He willat once findcompanions who suithis inclination,and you willbe unable to take him awayfrom them. But tryto cope as best you can! There willalso be frequentgatherings at yourhome, I foresee this,but you should go offinto your own corner and occupyyourself with yourown work [usually a referenceto sewing]or withreading. But ifyou notice thatthis displeases him, stop and beseech God to save him.55 Once again, cosmopolitan sociabilityis linked didactically to vice-at least for vulnerable young women-and seclusion with virtue. Labzina took this dichotomy even further in an ensuing passage, in which she quoted Kheraskov as exhorting her to keep up appearances at all costs. "Let him continue to believe that you do not suspect him.... As soon as you give him cause to feel that you know and that you will helphim remove his mask then he will be unbound and will no longer be ashamed of the unpleasantness that he causes you."56 For Labzina, then, civilityand politesse were reduced to mere masks, surface affectationsthat hid the truer abominations behind them. Good advice, perhaps, but hardly an invita- tion to public action. This antinomy of public falsityversus private or hidden truth has strong affinitiesto the Masonic cult of secrecy, in which the life of the lodge was understood to exist as a common pact or confidence behind closed doors. Members were often constrained to maintain public silence about this inner life at all costs, the only guarantee against the onslaught of society's carnality and spiritual weakness. Labzina clearly understood this line of reasoning, a commonplace of her milieu during her second marriage,57and she appears to have accepted Kheraskov's contention that giving public expression to her private sufferingwould uncage the beast of carnal passion (Karamyshev's depravity), thereby defeating Labzina, who is thus obliged to act as society's spiritual gatekeeper. This interchange with Kheraskov, then, shows with particular clarity Labzina's adeptness at absorbing the ideas that swirled around her and then reformulating them. Fears of passion unleashed and concomitant exhortations to forbearance and self-controlwere mainstays of Masonic discourse, extending from Kheraskov in the 1770s to Labzin fortyyears later. But where Masons saw women as carnal and Masonic brothersas spiritual and disciplined, Labzina subtlyreversed the order by endowing herself (and, by extension, all women) with the understanding and forti- tude to protect civilizationfrom the animal excesses of free men, who were the true carnal forces and from whom the formal stricturesof law, orga- nized religion, and custom offerno protection, without the tacit-but essential- complicity of women. So, if Kheraskov was Labzina's voice of reason, reason was prescribing

55. Ibid., 58. 56. Ibid. Emphasisadded. 57. Sergei TimofeevichAksakov's Family Chronicle offers a well-knownexample of a familystriving to comfortfemale victims of male misbehavior,while deeming thismisbe- haviorprivate. S. T. Aksakov,The Family Chronicle, trans. M. C. Beverley(New York,1961) is a highlyabridged translation of the original.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheEnlightenment of Anna Labzina 383 a highlydisciplinary guardianship over women ratherthan individuality and curiosity,private safety over public expression.For Foucauldians or feministcritics of Habermas thisgender-specific and repressivedeploy- ment of reason sounds depressinglyfamiliar, constituting the putative Achilles'heel of the entireEnlightenment project.58 And yet,for Labzina matterswere not so simple,since she was not proposingto challenge the legitimacyof patriarchyper se, or the moral authorityof her elders. Rather she was tryingto define for herselfthe proper exercise of that authorityand to articulateher own basis on whichto assesswhether that exercisewas desirable or not vis-a-visits bearing on her life as a young woman. She luxuriated in her extradomesticlife, whether with her mother,Karamyshev, or Labzin, and whetherit involvedcharity, literary evenings,journalism, or intercessionwith public authorities.Moreover, she tookpride in her abilityto thinkthings through, to reflect,and to reason,powers that she put vividlyon displayin all her writings.What, then, providedthe inspiration,if not TheEnlightenment? A completeanswer, at leastone providedby her ownwritings, remains elusive, but at the level of cosmology,or her personalexplanation for the orderof things,she turns repeatedlyto God, and herbelief in a godlyauthority that superseded, but did not overturn,the lawsof man and nature.A "rebelin the name of the Lord" as it were.

Divinelyinspired action often involved individual deeds of charity,going withher mother,her nanny,or alone to give alms and feed or clothe the poor, and to prayover them. Labzina's exemplarwas her mother,and the intercessionspiritual: "I was seven yearsold and had alreadystudied literacy,but it was my motherwho taughtme how to write,and it was she who began to educate myheart, greatly with her words,and doublyso by example.... If a dying man was losing consciousness, she reassured and comforted him with the hope of our Savior.... Often in such cir- cumstancesshe prevailedupon me to read aloud about the sufferingsof Christthe Savior, which gave extraordinarycomfort to the ill."59From her mother:"Visit the sick,my friend, and console the sufferingand troubled. And alwaysremember that theyare as close to you as brothers,and on theirbehalf you shall be rewardedby the heavenlyKing."60 Sentimentssuch as these turnout to be fairlycommonplace in women'sautobiographical writings. Elizabeth Evasdaughter's study of the mem- oirsof American Catholic women makes the pointthat "Autobiographical works... prove thatfor centuries we have had a traditionthat ... asserts a woman'sduty to participatein societyin a spirituallyindependent and responsiblemanner."'6' Autobiographical works, she argues,constituted

58. Landes, Womenand thePublic Sphere,204-7; Fraser, "Rethinkingthe Public Sphere," 113-21; and the essaysby Nancy Fraser,Jean L. Cohen, Joan B. Landes, and Marie Fleminginjohanna Meehan, ed.,Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Dis- course(New York,1995), 21-138. 59. Labzina, Vospominaniia,5. 60. Ibid., 8. 61. ElizabethN. Evasdaughter,Catholic Girlhood Narratives: The Churchand Self-Denial (Boston, 1996), 25.

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an expressionof spiritual self-defense for Catholic women against a brutal outsideworld, one thatoffers up the author'sown lifeas a model usefulto others,in particularas an exampleof forbearance, subordination, and self- lessnessin both privateand public life.62Patricia Meyer Spacks's analysis ofthe autobiographies of women of great public accomplishment- Golda Meir,Hannah Arendt,among others-makes a similarpoint: "Goodness is selflessness... and vice versa."63 All these observationsoffer valuable insightinto Labzina's works,in whichthe self-referentialdisplay of subordinationto authorityand Chris- tian selflessnessare paramount.But onlyto a point. Labzina tellsus that she was taughtthat good worksand obedience to faithpaid off."Never forget,my friend, that good deeds are rewardednot onlyin the next life but even here."64On the eve of her marriageto Karamyshev,her mother advised,"If you end up livingin the widerworld, in all of yourpleasures do not forgetto providehelp forthe poor and unfortunate.Do not become idle, for idleness is the motherof vice."65It is thisvery sense of a highercalling to action,a spiritualobligation through prayer and minis- trationto thewider world that transcends the otherwiseunchallengeable, but manifestlyunfair, manmade lawswithout undermining them, which offeredLabzina a path to individualchoice and resistanceto authority.To her husband: "You have the authorityto depriveme of myproperty and peace of mind,but you cannot take awaymy conscience and good name. God protectsme, and he has guarded overme from my mother' womb up un- tilthis very day. You findit worthwhile to thinkthe way you do, but leaveme bewith my own rules. I assureyou, so long as the hand of God protectsme I shall not strayfrom the path ofvirtue, and I shall not accept youradvice. It would bringharm to mybody and soul!"66 For Labzina, however,selflessness required much more thanforbear- ance. It demanded action, specificallysocial action outside the household. Unmovedby the Enlightenment'scall to improvementthrough in- stitutionalreform (to which she, as a woman, had no recourse anyway), Labzina neverthelessdemanded more ofherself than the manyindividual acts of charity(the 'good' or 'blessed' workof blagotvoritelnost')that she performed.She sawherself as an intercessor(zastupnitsa), that is, one who used her standingto championthe needs of the powerlessand downtrod- den byintervening on theirbehalf with constituted authority.67 As Lotman

62. Ibid., 26-27 and 85. 63. PatriciaMeyer Spacks, "Selves in Hiding,"in Estelle C. Jelinek,ed., Women'sAuto- biographies:Essays in Criticism(Bloomington, 1980), 114. 64. Labzina, Vospominaniia,15. 65. Ibid., 22. 66. Ibid., 78. Emphasisadded. 67. Eighteenth-centuryterms and spellingswere typicallyunsystematic, and as a rule assigninga singlefixed meaning or expressionto fluidconstructions is ill advised.Zastupa or zastuplenieare prime examples in thatthey have no specificlegal standing.Thus, de- pendingon context,it could implyprotection, formal guardianship, or personalinterces- sion bya powerfulperson with access on behalfof a client,one who,by using this language, formallyacknowledges subordination. V. Dal', Tolkovyislovar' zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow,1989), 1:643; Slovar'russkogo iazyka XVIII veka(St. Petersburg,1995), 8:104-5.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TheEnlightenment of Anna Labzina 385 observed, thiswas a common theme in saints' lives and in the whole kenotic tradition of Russian spirituality,sacred and secular. The role of intercessor could also define a specificallyfemale activity,at least in the eighteenth century,wherein a wife was empowered to intercede with her husband, who held formal authority,on behalf of kin, servants,or humble petition- ers who feared to approach the pater familias directly.M. I. Semevskii long ago described in some detail how the intercession on behalf of supplicants was a common expectation for wives of the politically powerful,including the wives of tsars,an essential if little explored link in the murkycontin- uum of Russia's politics from public to private, law-based to familial.68"In addition to the lowly,a large number of poor women turned to the tsaritsa withsupplications regarding theirown needs, presenting them on holidays or name days of a member of the tsar's family."69Similarly, Catherine I, as both tsaritsaand as empress, received literallyhundreds of requests (over 120 in 1724 alone!) for assistance and intercession on behalf of those who felt that they could not petition Peter directly.70 Thus, intercession demanded an engagement with relations of au- thorityin a way that charitydid not. And in Labzina's experiences (and perhaps Russia's more generally) it implied a specificallyfeminine inter- vention in those relations, a hitherto little explored engendering of em- powerment. Indeed, her decision to link spiritual inheritance with her mother ("from her verywomb") was unquestionably deliberate, and ap- parentlynot easily reached. In an early footnote, Modzalevskii reproduces an alternative introduction to the memoir that she had initiallywritten and then discarded. This variant highlights her father much more, both by pairing him repeatedly with her mother ("my parents"), and-more significantly-by associating the primary attribution of almsgiver and benefactor with her father rather than her mother. I was born ofhonest and generousparents. My birth brought my par- entsgreatjoy, for, although they had had childrenprior to me, none had lived. I was the firstwhose lifehad broughtthem pleasure.... My parents celebratedmy birthday not withballs and fancydinners, but by as- sistingthe downtroddenand offeringaid to all the poor, feedingthem forthree days. And myfather himself served them, he went to the pris- ons and distributedwhat they required ... I did not enjoythe happinessand love of myprogenitor [roditel'] for verylong.... I had just turnedfive when death took thisbeneficent fa- therand friendof the poor."71

68. M. Semevskii,Tsaritsa Praskov'ia, 1664-1723: Ocherkiz russkoiistorii XVIII veka (Moscow,1989), 17-39; Hughes, "Peterthe Great's Two Weddings,"38- 41. More recently, Isolde Thyrethas expanded on theirwork by suggesting that, while in the terem,tsaritsy had the abilityto act as arbitersin a varietyof legal disputes.Isolde Thyret,"Life in the Krem- lin under theTsars Mikhail Fedorovich and AlekseiMikhailovich: New Perspectiveson the Institutionof the Terem"(paper presentedat the conference"Private Life in RussianHis- tory,"Ann Arbor,May 1995). 69. Semevskii,Tsaritsa Praskov'ia, 12-13. 70. M. I. Semevskii,Tsaritsa Katerina Alekseevna: Anna I VillimMons, 1692-1 724 (1884; reprint,Moscow, 1994), 356-67. 71. Labzina, Vospominaniia,1-2.

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For whateverreason, Labzina set aside thisparents-and-father-centered beginning (which in the firstdraft went on for several pages) in favor of one that transferredall of the valorization,virtually verbatim, to her mother.On the day afterher mother'sdeath, when the courtyardwas filledwith beggars and the sick expressingpublic grief,Labzina, now anointed by the unfortunateto be her mother'sspiritual successor, received a note fromthe prison warden requestingthat the prisonersbe allowed to visitand pay theirrespects to her biological and theirspiritual mother.In this one small gesture her nascent worldlyauthority is ac- knowledgedby the warden who symbolicallypasses the torchfrom mother to daughter.In the processshe bringsanother dimension to intercession, one thatmomentarily subordinates male temporalauthority to a female spiritualone. Here we see the suggestionof a thirdsocial realm-faith- outside both the civiland the household, in whichsocial patriarchyis fi- nallysupine beforethe fatherhoodof God and in whichthe femininebe- comes trulypowerful. This act of moralinheritance legitimated Labzina's own sense of public spirituality,utterly unconnected to materialinheritance.72 Thus, during her eighteen-monthstay in Nerchinskshe establishedher public persona byexercising this spiritual inheritance of public charity,taking care of the exiles and comfortingthe sick.73"Every day God presentedme with an opportunityto do good.... I fulfilledmy mother's instructions here: I visitedthe sufferingand ill everyday and tended to them.I even had the opportunityto do good in distantplaces.... Oh, how contentedmy heart was then! I did not have any bad thoughts,and myhusband's shameful deeds affectedme less."74 The circle of feminineheritage-faith-centered intercession-thus, is completedat themoment when she is obliged to leave Nerchinskand re- turnto Irkutskwith her husband. Those who had receivedLabzina's ten- der merciesgathered at theirhouse, and again in defianceof civiland pa-

72. In writingabout holymen and women,both Peter Brownand Brenda Meehan have observed,in Meehan'swords, that "the authority of the holyman derivesin partfrom his [or her] asceticdiscipline, which both giveshim a reputationfor spiritual prowess and rendershim capable of spiritualjudgment." But unlike Brown'sholy men and Meehan's holywomen, Labzina neverproclaimed herself holy or uniquelyspiritual. Neither she nor her motheraspired to asceticism-even thoughboth exerciseda kind of religiousdisci- pline over theirbodies and behavior-and neitheris depicted as havinga charismaticor unworldlyrelationship with God. On the contrary,their identities and strivingstoward service were entirelysocial and familial:Labzina was a daughter,ward, and wifethroughout her life,and it was as a spiritual,but thoroughlylay, mother that she carriedout her public activities.Far fromseparation from society, she embracedit in her day-to-dayexistence, albeiton her own terms.Indeed, itwas the sense thather chosen pathwas open to anyone fromany walk of lifethat made her faithso thisworldly and publiclyrelevant. In thiscon- textit maybe usefulto distinguishbetween holy lives, endowed witha supernaturalaura, and pious ones, devotedto doing God's workin theworld as one findsit. Brenda Meehan- Waters,"The Authorityof Holiness: Women Asceticsand SpiritualElders in Nineteenth- CenturyRussia," in GeoffreyA. Hosking,ed., Church,Nation, and Statein Russiaand Ukraine (New York,1991), 41; PeterBrown, "The Rise and Functionof the Holy Man in Late An- tiquity,"JournalofRoman Studies, 61 (1971): 80-101. 73. Labzina, Vospominaniia,84. 74. Ibid., 88.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Enlightenmentof Anna Labzina 387 triarchalpower, proclaimed her theirmother and protectorto the police chief,"'This timeyou maybeat us but we willnot heed you! Do you know of what we are being deprived?' . . . [to Labzina] 'Before you arrived we werehungry, naked, and barefoot,and manydied offrost. You clothedus, and lightenedour loads, you tended the sick,gathered provisions for us fromthe surroundingarea . .. so thatwe werewell fed."'75 The point here is not one of facticity.Whether this particular scene happened, or whetherLabzina was the devoted and patientpresence in real lifethat she invariablydisplayed in the text,is less importantthan the factthat she constructedthis pattern of female inheritance,female lin- eage, bylinking God the fatherto public activityand even to resistance- but not refusal-to this-worldlypatriarchal authority. Labzina could not have been more explicitabout her engenderingof spiritualinheritance and itsliberating role in thisworldly affairs. "At these moments,all of my mother'slessons and wordswere vividlyreborn in mymemory, and I often spoke as ifshe could hear me: 'My honorable progenitress[roditelni- tsia], here is your daughter carryingout your testament! ... I am here with no guide at all, but mayyour spirit be myprotector!"'76 It should be reiteratedthat all of theseretrospections relate to her life withKaramyshev. During her marriageto Labzin and her subsequentin- volvementwith Freemasonry, Labzina participatedactively in obshchestvo, by participatingin Freemasonry,journalism, philosophical circles,and soirees,and whetherdeemed sociabilityor public sphere,she was a part of it. It was this milieu that occupied her diaryof 1818, and while she makesfew direct references to her motherin it,she continuesto express her sense of spiritualmission and female guardianshipin the name of God the father. DyingSphinx laymired in a major crisisat thistime, one thatdivided the membershipinto factionsand thatdistressed both Labzin and Lab- zina greatlyand thateventually contributed to the renewedban on lodges in 1822: "here is something that disturbs [my heart] . . . this divine and holyunion has splitinto two factions and ... itis killingmy spirit.... They [i.e., the lodge's membership]themselves clearly demonstrate who is in whichfaction ... I do not knowwhat will come of all this,or whetherGod willaccept it. He Himselfsaid, 'Love one another,and youshall be acknowl- edged as mydisciples.' Where is thatbrotherly love? There is none."77 Politesociety, in whichshe now spentmost of her time,drew an equal measure of scorn. "Thus theyuse myhusband's good heart to evil purpose; he joyouslyshares with them all that the Lord sends him in His bounty,but it seems theyare alreadysated and stuffedfull, and theygo to daintyworldly feasts where the fleshis satisfiedbut not the soul, which sitsthere dozing, and the conscience begins to nod offtoo. All the inner worldis lulled by the siren'ssong."78 As withKaramyshev decades earlier, the fatalflaw lay in the flesh,the temptationof weak-mindedmanhood, to whicheven the brethrenof DyingSphinx were susceptible. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 89. 77. "DnevnikA. E. Labzinoi,"in Labzina, Vospominaniia,116. 78. Ibid., 119.

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Labzina took this rhetoric still furtherby giving politesse a decidedly eschatological reading. I wentinto the study,but somehownone of the conversationwas calm- ing. It was all about injustices,civil and religiousalike, but we can talkall we want.We willnot be anyhelp. It is apparentthat everything is headed fordestruction though everyone seems to be tryingto createand build.... The externalis givenpreference over the internal,and thatis whythere is such disorganization.... It seems that hard and painful times are on theirway, and the comingof our Shepherd and Teacher is near. You can feel in yourheart the joyful echo of blissin preparation,and the corporeal willshudder from great sorrows and persecutions.79 The earthlystruggle thus pits the spiritual against the corporeal, and while the Masonic brothers may not recognize it, Labzina does. She, and by extension all women, becomes Eve's daughter, capable of knowing more, but equally prone to using their superiorityto seduce helpless men into carnal sin. The diary,in fact,reserves its most savage commentary for womankind. I have long knownthat we womenwere able to make the best and kind- est man waverand turnhim fromhis purpose for our own ends, and moreoverto make him see it all in the best lightand even as Christian virtue:if the idol of myheart needs this,then I willstoop to it.Never will man come to understandwoman, with all the cunningand slynessof our sex even if he knowsher for20 years.It takesonly six monthsto figure out a man,but us-never. Forgiveme, mercifulGod, forthese thoughts, but I have the misfortuneto know thisfrom much experience. I have neverbeen led into troubleby a man,whereas women have triedto cast me down into the abyss,and men have saved me.80 This passage, let us recall, was penned a mere eight years after she wrote her scathing memoir of her low-lifefirst husband! And yet the basis of her resistance to the turmoil among her brothers and sisters (her terms) and her alternative construction of a life in society retained her acute sense of divine justice, a legacy that ran from God the father through her mother and down to herself. How in the end are we to make sense of the paradoxes that Labzina sketched in her writings?Lotman argues that "the tragedy reflected in Labzina's memoir is not just a conflict of incompatible characters, tem- peraments, and ages, it is also a dramatic collision of two cultures that lacked a common language or even the most elementary basis for translation fromone [language] to the other."'8'This hypothesis ignores the fun- damentally retrospectivequality of the memoir, written many years after Labzina had become well acquainted with the language, writings,and manners of educated society. The text provides many examples in which Labzina offered her own recapitulation and simultaneous translation of Kheraskov's and Karamyshev'swords of wisdom. The issue, then, was not one of the absence of a common language, but rather Labzina's interpre- tation and abject rejection of the ideals presented to her by polite society.

79. Ibid., 123. 80. Ibid., 119. 81. Lotman,"Dve zhenshchiny,"304.

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What about the conflictof two cultures?This antinomypresumably comes down to the familiarbinarisms of sacredversus secular, Enlighten- mentversus tradition. Here too the iron law of dualismobscures as much as it illuminates.Granted, Labzina's cosmologyexpressed a conservative faith-centerednessand a piousness thatfell well outside the rationalism and naturalismthat defined Karamyshev's modernity (rather less true of Kheraskov's).In everyother sense, however, the memoir and diaryare un- imaginableprior to or outside the Enlightenment.All aspects of the life she described-the social discourse,the public visibility, attending the theater,reading (including novels and laypietistic books) as both spokenand silentpractices-were partand parcel of a sociabilitythat is unimaginable in Russiabefore the eighteenth century, particularly for noblewomen. Her argumentsresonate withan Enlightenment-likeindividualism in which she uses her own experienceas a backdropagainst which to assessthe justice and reasonabilityof man-made laws.Add to thatthe factthat these werepenned bya laywoman describing a highlyvisible and public life,one in whichshe willfullyand openlysubjects many of the men in her lifeto the riskof public ridicule.Indeed, the verywriting of the memoirand di- arycan be understoodas an individualisticrejection of the instructions she received ("leave me be with my own rules.... I will not follow your advice") to bear her burden silentlyso as to preservethe reputationof her lord and masterhusband. Who, then,was the traditionalist,Labzina or Kheraskov/Karamyshev, and who theembodiment of individualism, un- extinguishedby authority and convention? The point here is not to abandon binary oppositions altogether but ratherto insistthat they do not correspondvery closely to individual outlooks,a point thatLotman himselfmade in a numberof otherworks. Labzina, the complex thinkerand rhetorician,was as much a productof the Russian Enlightenmentas her husband. Conversely,the patriarchal cloisteringand dominationof women thatthe thoroughlymodern men in her lifeexpostulated was everybit as "traditional"as Labzina's religious convictions. One finaldocument relevant to the genderingof civicvirtue was written not by Labzina, but by the brothersof DyingSphinx, who in August 1819 wanted to honor her and her husband fortheir twenty-five years of mnarriageand manyyears of serviceto the lodge.82In a ceremonythat the membershipapparently made up, theyformally recognized that Labzina's servicewas equivalent to theirown, that she was indeed theirsister, and they made her an honoraryMasonic sisterand presentedher with a blue pillow bearinga pair ofwomen's gloves which were deemed "Masonicgloves." "In truth,... she is our sister,for in her exerciseof all our obligationsto the letter,only her sex preventsher frombeing our brother."83Her service, accordingto thistestimony, consisted in her serviceto God, her charity, her humility,and her patience in the face of the evilsof the world. Lodges elsewherehad been enrollingwomen since the 1750s,and by the 1780s these feminized"lodges of adoption"had become widespread 82. Tira Sokolovskaia,"Podnesenie massonskikh perchatok A. E. Labzinoi: Epizod iz istoriiRusskogo masonstva (1819)," Russkiiarkhiv, 1905, no. 12:532-35. 83. Ibid., 533.

This content downloaded from 129.49.5.35 on Tue, 02 Feb 2016 17:42:26 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 390 Slavic Review in France.84Such was rarelythe case in Russia, however.Much like the Freemasons in North America,Russian lodges had largelyignored the question of femalemembership, and althoughtheir rituals and celebra- tionsevinced a deeplygendered quality(in thatthey celebrated maleness and thevirtues of men quite explicitly),they devoted almost no attention to thismatter in doctrine.5The ceremonyof the blue glovesinvented for Labzina constitutesa rare and possiblysingular episode fromthis era of a woman being in essence inscribedinto a Masonic brotherhoodin which she had played an integralrole forseveral years.86 As such, it is notewor- thythat the brothers,Russia's self-appointed public men, recognizedher as a kindredspirit and chose to honor her forthat very spiritual inheritance thatshe identifiedthroughout her life,not withthe Age of Reason or politesse,but witha sociabilityfounded upon pietyand matrilinearity. The extremepaucity of women'sautobiographical writings from this era precludesour going too fartoward claiming a definitivelyfeminine or spiritualpath to individualism,social action,and public-nessin the eighteenthcentury.87 Moreover, the returnsfrom other women's memoirs, few as theymay be, are mixed.Some passagesfrom Natalia Dolgorukaia's1767 memoirdo resembleLabzina's voice ("Lord JesusChrist, my Savior, for- give myboldness forwhat I say to Paul the Apostle: misfortunesin the hills,misfortunes in the den of thieves,misfortunes from intimates, mis- fortunesfrom bandits, misfortunes even at home. I givethanks to myGod foreverything in thathe did not instillin me a tastefor the sweetthings of thisworld. . ."88). But Dashkova'sand Durova's memoirsdo not. Still, forat least one woman in Catherine'sRussia, a faith-centeredworldview was mostassuredly the moral basis forconstructing a lifein public. 84. MargaretC. Jacob,Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politicsin Eighteenth- CenturyEurope (New York,1991), 135, 139- 42; JanetM. Burke and MargaretC. Jacob, "FrenchFreemasonry, Women, and FeministScholarship," Journal of Modern History 68 (September1996): 513-49. 85. On NorthAmerican Masonic practice,see StevenC. Bullock,Revolutionary Broth- erhood:Freemasonry and theTransformation ofthe American Social Order,1730-1840 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 180. 86. Smithcites a referenceto an earlierwork by Andrei Serkov claiming that at least threefemale lodges operated in the Russianempire in the 1780s,in Mitau,Zhitomir, and Vil'no respectively.But thereseems to be no documentarytrace of these lodges, and it is not knownwhether they included Russiansamong theirmembers. In Labzina's case we have the actual protocolsfrom Dying Sphinx, which detail ratherprecisely her relationship to,the lodge. Smith,Working the Rough Stone, 43-44. The role of women in Freema- sonryhas receiveda fairamount of recentattention, but verylittle of thathas focusedon Russia.A recentarticle by Maria Carlson commentsthat "Unlike the earlierlodges, which were exclusivelymale, manypost-1911 [Russian] lodges accepted women as members." Maria Carlson,"Fashionable Occultism: Spiritualism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, and Her- meticismin Fin-de-SiecleRussia," in Bernice GlatzerRosenthal, ed., TheOccult in Russian and SovietCulture (Ithaca, 1997), 147. 87. Kelly Herrold's recent dissertation,"Russian Autobiographical Material in French:Recovering a MemoiristicTradition (1770-1830) (Ph.D. diss.,University of Cali- fornia,Los Angeles,1998) containssome additionalobservations on memoirsand the pu- bic sphere.See, in particular,chapter 4: "MemoirLiterature and thePublic Sphere in Rus- sia," 177-207. 88. Svoeruchnyezapiski Kniagini Natal'i Borisovny Dolgorukoi docheri g. frl'dmarshala grafa BorisaPetrovicha Sheremeteva (St. Petersburg,1992), 92.

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